Source Sans Pro Readme file

Source Sans Pro was designed by Paul D. Hunt under the guidance of Robert Slimbach. It was Adobe's first open source typeface family, conceived primarily as a typeface for user interfaces. Source Sans Pro draws inspiration from the clarity and legibility of twentieth-century American gothic typeface designs. Distilling the best archetypical qualities of these models, Paul followed a rational design approach by simplifying glyph shapes by paring them to their essential form. However, in order to more easily differentiate similar letter shapes (such as uppercase I and lowercase L), some additional details have been added. Besides providing such explicitly clarity in short text strings, another fundamental design consideration was to create a typeface that reads well in extended settings. This can be seen in the general proportions: Source Sans Pro has been designed with a more generous width than many other comparable gothics, and its shorter majuscule letters, combined with minuscule letters with longer extenders, create a more pleasant reading texture in longer text passages.

Source Sans Pro currently supports a wide range of languages using Latin script. Additionally, this family's non-italic fonts support modern and polytonic Greek, and also feature coverage for extended Cyrillic. Other members of the greater Source type system include Source Code Pro, a monospaced version of Source Sans designed specifically for coding, and Source Serif Pro. As an open source project, it is expected that incremental updates will be made over time to extend glyph set coverage and functionality. If you are interested in contributing to this open source project, please visit this project page on GitHub for information on how to become involved. Source Sans Pro can be adapted and redistributed according to the terms of the Open Font License (OFL) agreement.

Menu Names And Style Linking

In many Windows® applications, instead of every font appearing on the menu, fonts are grouped into style-linked sets, and only the name of the base style font for a set is shown in the menu. The italic and the bold weight fonts of the set (if any) are not shown in the font menu, but can still be accessed by selecting the base style font, and then using the italic and bold style buttons. In this family, such programs will show only the following base style font names in the menu:

Source Sans Pro

Source Sans Pro Black

Source Sans Pro ExtraLight

Source Sans Pro Light

Source Sans Pro Semibold

The other fonts in this family must be selected by choosing a menu name and then a style option following the guide below.

Menu Name

plus Style Option

selects this font

Source Sans Pro

[none]

Source Sans Pro Regular

Source Sans Pro

Italic

Source Sans Pro Italic

Source Sans Pro

Bold

Source Sans Pro Bold

Source Sans Pro

Bold Italic

Source Sans Pro Bold Italic

Source Sans Pro Black

[none]

Source Sans Pro Black

Source Sans Pro Black

Italic

Source Sans Pro Black Italic

Source Sans Pro ExtraLight

[none]

Source Sans Pro ExtraLight

Source Sans Pro ExtraLight

Italic

Source Sans Pro ExtraLight Italic

Source Sans Pro Light

[none]

Source Sans Pro Light

Source Sans Pro Light

Italic

Source Sans Pro Light Italic

Source SansPro Semibold

[none]

Source Sans Pro Semibold

Source Sans Pro Semibold

Italic

Source Sans Pro Semibold Italic

On the Mac OS operating system, although each font appears as a separate entry on the font menu, users may also select fonts by means of style links. Selecting a base style font and then using the style links (as described above for Windows applications) enhances cross-platform document compatibility with many applications, such as Microsoft Word, although it is unnecessary with more sophisticated Adobe applications such as recent versions of Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign software.

One should not, however, select a base font which has no style-linked variant, and then use the bold or italic styling button. Doing so will either have no effect, or result in programmatic bolding or slanting of the base font, which will usually produce inferior screen and print results.

For all Roman fonts of family Source Sans Pro: version 2.010 created on Fri Jun 27 11:31:39 2014.

For all Italic fonts of family Source Sans Pro: version 1.065 created on Wed Jun 25 13:50:02 2014.